answersLogoWhite

0

No one knows.

We can measure space distance in light years (distance light travels in a year, at 186,000 miles a second or 300,000 km/s). One light year is nearly 10 trillion km.

Current best estimates suggest the universe has an age of about 13.7 billion years. At the very beginning, just after the big bang, it briefly but dramatically expanded at a rate far faster than the speed of light (known as the period of inflation) and then at a lesser speed since then. This has placed much of the universe so far away that it can never now be reached if travelling at the speed of light.

We can see 'back' to some distant objects as they appeared about 13 billion years ago (and theoretically we could see back to just after the big bang 13.7 billion years ago). The calculations for their current distance (and thus the radius of the visibleuniverse) are complicated by the fact that the space has been expanding in the meantime, but it must exceed (the speed of light) x (the time taken to get here), i.e. over 13 billion light years [or 130 billion trillion kilometers]. Taking interim expansion into account multiplies this figure by about three times, and also gives the radius of the observable universe - the bits we can see assuming we can see back to just after the big bang - as 46.5 billion light-years.

But, how big is the universe including the non-observable portion, the bit we have permanently lost track of because of inflation? The answer has been estimated as at least 1023 times as large, that's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times as large, and possibly far, far larger than that.

User Avatar

Wiki User

15y ago

What else can I help you with?